June 2016 Income Report

Why I’m Publishing Monthly Income Reports

(this post may contain affiliate links, but only those I personally use and recommend)

One of the reasons I was motivated to begin my blogging journey was from seeing fellow bloggers post monthly income reports. Whether they were making money or not, I find all of these posts to be inspiring. I hope that you will be able to find my income reports inspiring as well. To clarify, these reports will not include income from my husband’s or I’s jobs. This will only include income from any of the side jobs I am trying out and from this blog if I ever start to make money from blogging. I find it all very exciting and I look forward to where this journey will take me. If you are interested in starting a blog of your own, I recommend Bluehost, and explain why I recommend it in my How to Start a Blog page!

I chose to start my income reports from the very beginning of my blog so that you and I have something to compare to later down the road if I do in fact become successful at this. I also plan to include updates on traffic reports once I get this figured out. Please know, that I am choosing to share these income reports not to brag, but to motivate and inspire, and to provide a realistic idea of what you can expect to make starting out your own blog. Keep in mind, most of this income hasn’t been taxed yet so I will have to pay taxes on it come tax season.

I will be posting these income reports once a month, but plan to post new content 2-3 times a week. If you would like to follow along in my journey feel free to subscribe to my blog. You can be among the first to know every time I publish a new post, by using the subscription box on the right. Plus you will receive a free budgeting template when you subscribe!

My Blogging Journey

If you are curious to learn my reasons and motivations for beginning this blogging journey you should check out my “Why I am Starting a Blog.” To give you a brief overview, I have four major reasons for beginning this blog: 1) I need extra income to pay down some of our debt 2) I want to be my own boss and have my financial freedom 3) I want to help others avoid the mistakes I made 4) I need a creative outlet.

Last Month’s Income Report & Goals

Please note that my income report includes earned income in addition to received income, but I will separate the two to help demonstrate the growth of a blog over a long period of time.

Goals from June of 2016:

Grow my business Pinterest account to 1,000 followers.- Fail. My business Pinterest page now has 979 followers! I was so close to meeting this goal!!! I’m so proud of this growth and I’m really starting to see some traffic come to my blog from Pinterest from a variety of my pins! It’s pretty exciting and I am in no way disappointed with this growth!

Create a document to give in exchange for people signing up on my mailing list-Pass! I created a budgeting template! Please subscribe if you would like to receive this!

Make $200 in extra income-Pass! I earned

Create a business schedule-Pass! I made this early on this month and can now refer to it to stay focused and on task.

Have a content schedule through the end of 2016-Fail.I’ve actually found a system that works for me so I’m not upset that I didn’t meet this goal. I change my mind even when I do plan stuff out so it’s fine. However, I do want to have content ideas planned 2 months ahead so I have plenty of ideas to choose from.

Have 2 weeks of content prepared (only requiring editing or updates)-Fail.Again I found a system that works pretty well for me so I’m not too disappointed that I didn’t meet this. However, I would like to have content outlined at the beginning of each week, and prepared the night before I plan to publish a post.

Gain 3 new affiliate partners (bringing my partners up to 5)- Fail. I did apply to 3 partners but was only approved for 2 of them based on where I live.

Improve design and layout of blog-Pass!I updated my posts to have feature images, added a picture of me on the homepage, and improved the quality of my posts.

Traffic Report Breakdown

This is what my traffic report looks like from Google AdSense:

My blog made $0.78 from two ads this month! This my account balance up to $1.95! This is purely passive income which I hope to see continue to grow as more traffic comes to my site. I added a 2nd ad this month which definitely increased my income, but even if we allot $0.38 to each ad that is still a $0.32 increase for my one ad considering that I only made $0.06 last month from ads. I’m excited to continue to improve this area. I know that I could profit more from adding ads at the top and bottom of my page and even scrolling ads, but I don’t want to clutter my site and I personally hate those kind of ad placements. So…I’m going to be brainstorming new ideas for this. Currently, I don’t think the sidebar is a bad place to have ads so I may add a 3rd one there for now.

This is what my traffic looks like from Google Analytics:

I had some positives and negatives in my Analytics this month.

The negatives were the my bounce rate increased from 65.11% to 73.28%. I also had a drop in the number of sessions, average session duration, percentage of new sessions. I think a possible cause for this is that I removed several posts from my blog in order to combine them into posts with higher quality content. I’m going to be checking my Pinterest accounts and making sure old pins are removed so that potential visitors aren’t seeing an error message when they arrive to my blog. Hopefully, this will help. The decrease in new sessions though could mean that I am retaining more returning readers, so that could be a plus!

The positives were that I increased the number of users who visited my sit by 183, and I increased my page views by 273! This is exciting because I was warned by many bloggers that the summer months tend to show a decrease or steady flow of traffic, but not much growth. I’m hoping to get my page views to 2,000 by next month!

This is what my traffic looks like from Pinterest:

My average daily impressions grew from 186 to 350, and my average daily viewers grew from 118 to 237! I am very proud of this grow as it almost doubled! Plus when you compare this graph to last month’s you will see that I am experiencing more spikes in traffic where as last month I had 1 big spike of traffic and that was it. My goal is to have 700 daily impressions next month!

Here you see that my monthly viewers more than doubled from 2,202 to 4,765! That is fantastic and you see pretty steady growth which is really cool! My average monthly engaged viewers also increased from 88 to 133! Not quite double but pretty fantastic nonetheless! My goal is to have 8,000 monthly viewers next month!

Each month I hope to make big improvements on the quality, design, content, and growth of this blog. I feel like I did make a huge amount of progress this past month, even during the weeks where I felt myself struggle. I know I can do better and do more though! If you are interested in starting your own blog, don’t forget to check out my How to Start a Blog page.

If you can share my page on your social networks that would be fantastic! If you have any advice I’m open to that as well!

I look forward to see how next month turns out!!! Share below how your month turned out!

11 Comments

Thank you! This is why I like doing a monthly income report and weekly updates. Because while I may feel unproductive, I can see the changes and the growth long term. It reminds me I’m more productive then I give myself credit for 🙂

Yes, definitely! Good progress has been made. By the way, how do you see your total number of subscribers? I looked on Mailchimp and I couldn’t find anywhere that said the total number!Francesca – From Pennies to Pounds recently posted…Emergency Fund – You’ve Got To Have One!

Once you log in to Mailchimp, click on the lists tab, then it will show you all the different lists you have (I currently have 1 list). You can open each list and see all the email addresses and info in it.

Wow, I love how detailed this report is. I’ve just started a journey and hope to borrow a few of your details.
Being a techie, may I suggest you change your wordpress permalinks settings? It should help loads with your google rankings. That will help you get more visitors, which will help your AdSense revenue. It’s really easy to do too. http://www.shoutmeloud.com/best-wordpress-permalink-seo.htmlMatt | MyAppIncome recently posted…Getting Started Tasks

I plan on changing my permalinks but the first time I tried I ended up changing them so that you couldn’t navigate from the homepage of my website. So….I will do some research and plan to do this soon!